Seventy-two neck bones
It had more neck bones than almost any other animal that has ever lived.
In the sea · Sea reptiles
Elasmosaurus
Thin-plate lizard · el-LAZZ-moe-SORE-us
A plesiosaur with a tiny head on an astonishingly long neck, a broad body and four flippers.
- Size
- About 10 to 13m long
- Lived
- About 80 million years ago
- Found in
- Kansas, USA
Glides after you, neck snaking. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the elasmosaurus
Half of it was neck
The neck was about seven metres long.
The head on the wrong end
The scientist who first described it put the skull on the tip of the tail. A rival pointed it out, and they became enemies for life.
Not a swan's neck
It could not lift its neck high out of the water, whatever old pictures show.
A sneak attack
The small head could approach a shoal of fish while the big body stayed out of sight.
From the middle of America
Kansas was then at the bottom of a sea that split North America in two.
The real thing
Photos of the elasmosaurus
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Small fish and squid.
How we know
It is known from one skeleton found in 1867.
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